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Made up a batch of flanges this week. Thanks to some great people on here I have some cores on the way too so I will be able to do an exchange/refundable core charge thing to speed things up a bit very soon.

I also started development on an adapter that will work with the cheap aftermarket thermostat housings that currently don't work with SC's. It would be nice to have another option than just the old housings. I should have a CAD model done by the end of the weekend.

My thermostat housing has some pit damage but the flange looks ok, so rebuilding mine would be a waste. That will be cool to see how those aftermarket ones look after you make them work for the SC. Keep up the good work!

I was able to spend a few minutes this past weekend finishing the CAD model for a prototype adapter that will work with the generic aftermarket thermostat housings and then cut it out on the mill yesterday. I still have some development and machine work to do for the the fittings and bleeder but the housing itself is essentially done. That stuff will wait until the next time I order fittings/metal. It is essentially a 6061 aluminum sandwich with a gasket on both sides that would go between the intake manifold and the generic housing. It is currently a bit thicker than it probably needs to be at 1" thick but I can probably cut it down to around 0.700-0.750" or maybe even a bit less. The sealing surfaces were not machined yet as I am still working on them. A curious thing about the generic 3.8 SC housing that I bought from Rock Auto is that the flange on it is the same as the SC flange but mounted upside down on it. It is almost as if the engineer that copied it accidentally mirrored it in CAD before they had the tooling made for it and they got stuck with having to use them.

After a long break I jumped back on to the adapter to make common new replacement housing work with an SC intake recently. I made a few prototypes up trying a couple of different things and on the same morning when I was finishing the design on the next prototype which was to go out to be tested very shortly I ended up getting laid off for a few weeks at least due to the virus screwing with my workplace so that will have to wait for a bit unfortunately. Here is what the latest version would have looked like.

It looks as if you could use a more conventional thermostat gasket with your design. My 4.2 F150 uses an O-ring gasket that I like a lot more than the paper SC thermostat gasket. I'd be all for using that design on my SC.

It looks as if you could use a more conventional thermostat gasket with your design. My 4.2 F150 uses an O-ring gasket that I like a lot more than the paper SC thermostat gasket. I'd be all for using that design on my SC.

Thanks for the feedback. Good suggestion, thanks. I had been considering an o-ring but had not though about adding it to this revision but giving the fact that I now have an excess of time I will see about adding it. I would rather an O-ring over a gasket any day.